Climate change – Page 2

Climate change denial hits Dutch government

Published on June 29, 20113 Comments

Government party VVD wants to stop funding the KNMI, the Royal Meteorological Institute because it actually takes climate change seriously. According to member of parliament René Leegte the KNMI is a partisan organisation that listens too much to the IPCC (Dutch). What’s more, according to him twenty percent of the KNMI’s researchers work for the IPCC and are therefore certainly not to be trusted.

A shocking display of truthiness, roundly mocked in the Dutch media, but these accusations are done in the context of a debate about the possible privatisation of the KNMI. By throwing doubts about its independence and realibility Leegte attempts to make it easier to sell the idea of getting rid of it to parliament and the voter. It’s done very clumsily, but that it’s done at all is worrisome. More and more our rightwing parties are using Republican tactics to force through their ideologically driven policies.

Holland’s sad renewable energy record

Published on December 19, 20101 Comment

renewable energy's share of total energy production per EU country

The Open Knowledge Foundation kids held themselves an EUStat Hackday a few days ago, exploring European energy data. Of the various infographics they created, the above one is the most striking to me, seeing how renewable energy production in the Netherlands largely flatlined in the last decade (1998-2008). Only the UK, Norway and Poland were as bad or worse. In the context of the EU’s stated goal of having 20 percent of energy consumption being from renewable sources it means this decade has been wasted, no success booked in getting renewables off the ground. Not surprising, with the kind of governments we’ve had these past ten years, who if not quite actively hostile to the whole idea, never did much to encourage the growth of green energy. Subsidies have been laughable, direction lacking and every time decisions had to be made, the wrong ones were made. One example being the liberalisation of the Dutch energy market, in which energy suppliers and energy network companies were forced to separate, which immediately let to takeovers by foreign companies, leaving government that much less able to influence or direct energy policy.

Which explains why the three biggest new powerplants to be build are the coal fired plants E.on, Electrabel and RWE/Essent want to build in Rotterdam and Eemshaven — and yes, all three are foreign companies. These plants do not quite fit the EU’s plans for reducing carbon and sulphur emissions, now do they? The European Court of Justice (ECJ) advocate general seems to agree, in their advice to declare the permits given for these plants illegal. It all fits the hidebound, stupid policies of previous and current governments, who have been happy to let the industry take the lead and may now have to pay the price for such shortsightedness.

Vertical farming

Published on December 3, 2009

With the increasing awareness of climate change not just as a real threat, but as a threat that can’t really be solved by lifestyle adjustments, all kinds of radical ideas have moved into the limelight. One of which is vertical farming. The idea is simple: take industrial scale farming out of the countryside and into the city into proper factories while making it sustainable through control of the environment. The advantages of vertical farm, according to CBC News:

Conventional farms waste water. Despommier says irrigation accounts for 70 per cent of worldwide water use, and much of that is wasted as runoff, but because it’s contaminated with silt, pesticides and fertilizers, it can’t be captured and reused. Vertical farms would grow crops hydroponically, in a water-and-nutrient solution, or perhaps aeroponically, using a mist of nutrient-laden water. The approach could grow the same crops with as little as 10 per cent of the water used in traditional agriculture, Despommier argues.

Vertical farms would make it easy to grow food without chemicals. There is growing concern about the environmental effects of pesticides and fertilizers used in traditional agriculture. Some see organic farming as the answer, others argue organic farming can’t deliver the yields necessary to feed the world. But vertical farming would virtually eliminate the need for pesticides because air coming in could be filtered to keep pests out, and whatever fertilizers were used could be kept within the system and out of lakes and rivers.

Growing fresh produce in cities would make it more accessible to poor city-dwellers. As a public-health professor, this one particularly interests Despommier. “It’s very difficult to find fresh produce in inner cities,” he said, so people who live there tend to eat less nutritious foods. “The data is overwhelming,” he added: If healthier food is available, people will eat it.

Growing food close to where it’s eaten would reduce transportation needs, which would cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Reduced use of fossil-fuelled farm machinery would also help cut emissions.

Vertical farms would improve air quality in cities by consuming carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.

Some of these advantages are a bit dodgy; the problem with getting fresh produce into inner cities has little to do with how and where it is grown and more to do with supermarket policies. It’s the usual overselling of a project that mainly exists on the drawing board; everything positive that concievably could be attributed to the project has been included to make it more attractive. A pity, as vertical farming doesn’t need such obviously wrong arguments to sell itself.

That is, as long as the main disadvantage can be solved:

On his blog, Avent points out that steel-and-concrete buildings, without fancy finishing, cost $300 per square foot or more in large cities. That works out to about $13 million per acre, compared with $3,000 per acre for farmland in Indiana.

Tracing this statement back to the source I couldn’t see what this estimate is based on and whether or not this is a cost per square foot on ground level, or per floor. If the former, the higher you build the lesser the cost per farmer acre, if the latter it wouldn’t matter how high you build. Of course you need not have to build entirely new buildings, but could also adapt existing ones to vertical farming use; plenty of disused office blocks are waiting for a new destiny.

Another problem is light sources. Can a vertical farm actually gather enough light to produce crops on all its floors? Or will it need a lot of artificial lights? In which case of course much of the advantage it might have over “natural” farming might be lost again, not just because of increased cost, but also on environmental impact…

Personally I would love to see the idea of vertical farming as viable, but I’ve learned that personal or aesthetic preferences should not be a guide for these sort of things — we never got our L5 space colony either. So far vertical farming is still very much an experimental technology, with only a few trial setups in existence, including one in Paignton for some reason. More research is needed before it can become a reality.

Eco-enginering

Published on October 27, 2009

Alex:

One consequence of the whole Superfreakonomics fiasco, which has been thoroughly reported elsewhere in the blogosphere, is that I’ve changed my mind about geoengineering ideas. Up until now, I was of the opinion that the various proposals to check climate change by doing various things to the atmosphere or the oceans were no substitute for reducing CO2 emissions, but they were worth at least studying in order to have an emergency reserve option. And in fact, I always liked the stratospheric sulphur one because it didn’t involve massive space structures and it was, at least theoretically, reversible – the stuff rains out within weeks to months, so it’s possible to switch the thing off.

I’ve never had much trust in geoenginering. We’ve managed to fuck up the planet enough accidently for me to have trust in doing so deliberately and it’s sheer arrogance to imagine that we know enough to start fiddling with the climate directly when our accidental track record is so bad already. History is riddled with well intentioned human interference with ecosystems, none of which worked out well — just ask any Australian.

Heat – George Monbiot

Published on September 4, 2009

Cover of Heat

Heat
George Monbiot
277 pages including index
published in 2006

Thanks to the climate change camp in London held this past week, global warming is back on the news agenda again. Despite the rear guard action fought by the Exxon-Mobile sponsored climate change denial groups, the media has sort of accepted the reality of it over the past two years, but as Alex Harrowell fulminates against, it’s largely treated as a consumerist, lifestyle issue:

As with most British media green pushes, there’s little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it’s a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change — nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn’t going to work. And, again, it’s all consumer guff.

This is not something you can accuse George Monbiot of doing here. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning he quickly dismisses consumer driven solutions like the 10:10 campaign in the introduction. The entire point of the book is that we cannot solve the problem of climate change with lifestyle choices, but only through solutions that apply to everybody, not everybody else, as he puts it. He starts with the assumption that the only way to migate the consequences of global warming, as we cannot prevent it anymore, is to keep runaway climate change from happening and that can only happen if we can keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees celsius (above pre-industrial levels) in 2030. If not, major ecosystems begin collapsing as the ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide is exhausted. To keep this rise from happening we can’t just switch incandencent lightbulbs for LEDs, we need to cut 90 percent of our CO2 output. The challenge Monbiot sets himself in Heat is to show that we can do this without giving up our post-industrial lifestyles, by taking the United Kingdom as his test subject and looking at various aspepcts of our lives to see how CO2 output can be reduced in them. It is not a complete blueprint for change of course and you may not necessarily agree with all his solutions, but it is a genuine attempt at putting together a national plan of action that could be implemented relatively quickly and doesn’t require all of us to piss in hayboxes.